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Posts Tagged ‘Greencrap’

Land-grown biofuel is in enough trouble already as an enemy of the environment. But the vain pursuit of the imaginary CO2 enemy leads to numerous bad policy decisions.

“Hydrocarbon fuels will remain essential for modern air travel. So-called sustainable aviation fuels are expensive, produced in negligible volumes, and provide CO2 savings only on paper. As such, they fail the real sustainability test of affordability, plenty, and reliability.”

No longer can wind power outfits and those that make a living running propaganda for them claim that ‘there’s nothing to see here, move on.’ The wind industry’s victims – mocked and denigrated for years – have been vindicated. Now comes the vengeance. Litigation is already on foot in Victoria, with more claims to follow.

The significance of the WHO’s new noise guidelines hasn’t been lost on STT Champions Alan Jones and Liberal MP, Craig Kelly.

For several obvious reasons cited below, the conclusion should be that solar panels on road surfaces perform extremely poorly and are essentially an irrelevant waste of money. If the money has to be spent, putting the same amount of panels somewhere more suitable would be an easy improvement to make.
H/T Phys.org

Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels, says Dylan Ryan at The Conversation.

The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

Another ‘green’ fantasy bites the dust in the face of old-fashioned economic realities. Once again, without massive subsidies of public money the numbers just didn’t add up. Calling a taxi seems to have won the day. Now it’s see-you-in-court time as recriminations kick off.

The city of Paris is pulling the plug on an electric car-sharing system once hailed as the future of urban transport, with officials voting to cancel the contract in the face of mounting losses, as Phys.org reports.

The more than 4,000 silver Autolib hatchbacks had become a fixture on the streets of the French capital, with docking stations for the electric vehicles found every few blocks.

They can tinker at the margins with energy policy, but giving up fuel burning altogether is not a serious option given current dependency on it as a power source. The obvious problem being that the preferred ‘renewable’ replacements are too ineffective and unreliable to deliver power on the scale needed. Wasting money on such futile policies must detract from other projects too.

When President Donald Trump announced the US exit from the Paris climate deal one year ago, the mayor of Philadelphia was among those who vowed to keep carrying the torch, says Phys.org.

“Philly is committed to upholding at (the) local level the same commitment made by the US in the Paris climate agreement,” tweeted the sixth largest US city’s mayor, Jim Kenney, a Democrat.

That point was probably reached ten years ago when the UK’s notorious Climate Change Act was passed. Now we have things like this “Scandal of ‘killer’ wood burning stoves”.

The bitter truth is that these fiascos caused by our obsession with wood-burning are just a part of a larger disaster that taints almost every green scheme governments have foisted on Britain, writes Christopher Booker in the Daily Mail.

The Government earned plaudits from the green lobby yesterday for its new plan to crack down on the craze for wood-burning stoves.

As the Mail reported on its front page, the stoves chuck out lethal pollution, particularly from wet wood, and contribute to thousands of early deaths from lung and heart disease.

Like it or not, there are already industrial quantities of renewable installations and their hardware in many places around the world. Sooner or later the problem of what to do with hordes of obsolete wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and suchlike ‘green’ paraphernalia has to be addressed to prevent a massive pile-up of industrial waste.

Building massive infrastructure for solar and wind energy, and introducing electric vehicles, will help citizens in developing countries live the lifestyles they desire without the need to burn dirty fossil fuels.

But though these technologies have existed for decades, there’s no plan to make sure they remain green to the end.

Experts forecast hundreds of thousands of tons of old wind turbine blades, batteries, and solar modules will need to be disposed of or recycled in the next decade—and millions of tons by 2050.

Read on about the technologies evolving around the world to handle this unusual waste stream – here.

Nothing new there perhaps but, like the boiling frog, the reality of an endless upward ratchet of climate charges on bills may still not have fully sunk in with some of the public yet.
H/T The GWPF

Any doubt that increases in UK electricity prices are the result of energy and climate policies, rather than underlying wholesale energy costs, is firmly set aside by the recent announcement from Opus Energy that it must increase its prices to consumers by 7.5% even to those on Fixed Term contracts because of sharply rising “pass through” costs, namely subsidies to renewables, grid management, and the Capacity Market.

Opus Energy, part of the Drax Group and winner of the British Small Business award for Energy Provider of the Year (2017), has written to customers in the last week announcing a 7.5% increase in electricity supply charges.

Former Trade and Industry Minister, Peter Lilley warns that vested interests in the renewables industry, politicians of all parties, the bureaucracy and academia have together largely suppressed debate about their reckless waste of public money exposed by the government’s own Review of the Cost of Energy by Dieter Helm.

In a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Peter Lilley highlights Professor Dieter Helm’s devastating critique, outlined in the Cost of Energy Review which was commissioned by the government.

“Helm shows that the Climate Change Act objective of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide could have been met for a fraction of the £100 billion so far committed, which has already raised the cost of energy by 20%.”

One local complained: ‘Residents used to be able to watch the sun setting over the sea at Blackpool. Now all they can see is a mountain of muck.’ Not to mention the foul smell.

Clayton Hall, a supposedly ‘green’ electricity plant in Lancashire, has been generating misery for months – by shrouding thousands of nearby homes in a stinking fog of poisonous gas, writes David Rose in The Mail on Sunday.

The owners of the plant at the Clayton Hall landfill site in Lancashire, sandwiched between the commuter towns of Leyland and Chorley, a golf course and pretty, rolling hills, have received about £1.7 million in green energy subsidies since it opened in 2010.

These levies are added directly to consumers’ household bills. The firm has made a further £1.7 million from selling power to the grid.

Greens playing propaganda tricks on the public? Probably not their first ‘offence’ of this kind…
H/T The GWPF

Environmental activists have withdrawn an advertising campaign after being accused of making false claims about the price of wind energy, says the Daily Mail.

The poster, launched in September by Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi and plastered around Westminster Tube station and across London’s transport network, claimed the price had fallen by 50 per cent over the past two years.

Let’s hope other scenic but corrupted areas take up the baton to get more of these ridiculous industrial eyesores removed from our natural environment.

A dozen 140ft wind turbines on the edge of the Lake District are due to be dismantled next summer after a decision which could result in many more being removed to restore views, reports the GWPF (from The Times).

The wind farm on Kirkby Moor on the Furness peninsula in Cumbria would be the first large one to be taken down since they began appearing around Britain in 1991.

South Lakeland district council refused an application by the wind farm operator to keep the turbines operating for another ten years until 2027.

We’re told Peter Lilley MP ‘calculates a cumulative cost of over £10,000 per household between 2014 and 2030’. Much pain, little gain, no sense of economic reality? Many electricity customers can’t afford these massive and largely avoidable extra costs mandated by the targets of the UK Climate Change Act, in the vain hope of altering the weather.

Sir Ian Byatt, British economist, former Government advisor and a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council, is presenting a paper today at a climate conference organised by L’association des Climato-Réalistes in Paris, reports The GWPF.

Abstract: The climate change policy of successive British governments are damaging the UK economy.

The UK is unique in having ambitions (80% by 2050) targets for reducing emission of CO2 embedded in a Climate Change Act, and monitored by a Parliamentary committee.

Climate change policy could reduce average individual household income by more than £10,000 over a period from 2014 to 2030, or more if targets for electric cars are also to be met.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the cost of Environmental Levies and the RHI scheme, (all a consequence of the Climate Change Act), will have risen to £13.5bn by 2021/22.

All of this cost is borne by energy consumers, except for the RHI, which is taxpayer funded.

But what is likely to happen to these costs in the years after 2021/22? Dieter Helm in his recent report reckons the cumulative cost will be well over £100 billion by 2030, but this appears to be way under the mark, given the costs already identified up to 2021.

There has been an ongoing conspiracy between the Government and the Committee on Climate Change to conceal the true cost of their policies.

I have therefore now undertaken a detailed study of the real costs between now and 2030, and the results are truly horrifying.

The head of a turbine is lying on the ground at Australia’s Mawson Antarctic base [image processed by CodeCarvings Piczard]

Flying turbines ahoy! Fossil fuel to the rescue as usual.

The blades of a wind turbine at an Australian Antarctic base broke off and narrowly missed a storage building as they crashed to the ground, reports Phys.org, forcing the icy outpost to switch to backup power.

The head of the turbine, one of two at Mawson station, plunged 30 metres (100 feet) on Tuesday evening, despite there being only moderate gusts of wind at the time.

All 13 members of the expedition at the station are safe, and were inside their living quarters at the time, said Rob Wooding, general manager of support and operations at the base.

The second turbine was deactivated as a precaution, with the base switching to its diesel generators.

The short working life of wind turbines compared to power stations, plus their lack of commercial viability, will likely put the brakes on German renewables expansion according to this GWPF report. Where do used wind farms go to die?

Wind power is the most important component of Germany’s green energy transition.

The end of subsidies for older turbines, however, threatens countless wind farms. By 2023, more than a quarter of Germany’s onshore wind farms may be gone.

South Australians must wake up each morning in the vain hope that it’s all just a very bad dream.

Alas, their sorry reality is one dictated by wind worshipping lunatics, not least its vapid Premier, Jay Weatherill.

Last week, Weatherill launched an astonishing tirade against Chris Kenny – a columnist with The Australian and The Advertiser – calling him a “right-wing fuckwit” for having the temerity to point out one or two fairly obvious facts about the unfolding disaster caused by Weatherill’s obsession with wind power.

With a grid on the brink of collapse (the coming summer promises more mass blackouts and load shedding, whenever wind power output collapses on a total and totally predictable basis) and the highest power prices in the world by a country mile, you might think that humility would be the order of the day among the leaders responsible…

Wherever onshore wind turbines are built there will also be networks of electricity pylons to carry the power away. Tourism is big business in windy Scotland.

A survey carried out on behalf of the John Muir Trust (JMT) found that 55% of respondents were “less likely” to venture into areas of the countryside industrialised by giant turbines, electricity pylons and super-quarries, reports The Times (via GWPF).

Just 3% said they were “more likely” to visit such areas, while 26% said such large-scale developments would make “no difference”. The poll has rekindled calls for Scottish ministers to increase protection for wild and scenic areas that, it is argued, will protect rural tourism businesses.